hello, Mr. Smith," she's saying, "won't you come in?" He will. He ducks reflexively on step- ping through the door, as if his head would crack the doorframe, a tall man with dangling hands, a grubby white shirt, and a tie that looks as if it had been used to swab out the deep fryer at McDonald's. In his left hand, a plain brown shopping bag, and, as she shuts the door behind him and six or seven cats glance up suspiciously from their perch on the mantel, he holds it out to her. "Here it is," he says, and, sure enough, her purse is inside, soft black leather with a silver clasp and the ponzu- sauce stain etched into the right panel like an abstract design. She fumbles through the purse for her wallet, think- ing to offer him a reward, but then she remembers that there's no money in it-hadn't he said on the phone that the money was gone? "I wanted to-" she begins, "I mean, you've been so nice, and 1-" Bob Smith is not listening. He's wandered out into the arena of the grand room, hands clasped behind his back, dodging mounds of discarded magazines, unravelling skeins of yarn, toppled lamps, and a cat-gutted ot- toman. He has the look of a prospective buyer, interested but not yet commit- ted. "Pretty old place," he says, taking his time. My widow, plumped with grat- itude, is eager to accommodate him. "Nineteen-oh-nine," she says, working the purse between her hands. "It's the only Prairie-style-" "The rugs and all," he says, "they must be worth something. And all this pottery and brass stuff-you must have jewelry; too." " Oh " O d " I ' b , yes, my WI ow says, ve een collecting antique jewelry for, well, since before I was an antique myse " and she appends a little laugh. What a nice man, she's thinking, and how many out there today would return a lady's purse? Or anything, for that matter? They'd stolen the lawn mower right out of the garage, stripped the tires off the car that time she'd broken down in Oxnard. She's feeling giddy, ready to dial Inge the minute he leaves and crow about the purse that's come back to her as if it had WIngs. "Your husband here?" Bob Smith 86 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12, 2001 asks, picking his way back to her like a man on the pitching deck of a ship. There seems to be something stuck to the bottom of his left shoe "My husband?" Another laugh, muted, caught deep in her throat. "He's been gone twenty years now. Twenty- O " one. r no, twenty-two. "Kids?" "Our son, Philip, lives in Calcutta, India. He's a doctor." "So there's nobody here but you," Bob Smith says, and that's when my widow feels the :fITst faint stirring of alarm. A cat rises slowly on the periphery of her vision, stretching itself The sun slants through the windows, irradiating the skeleton of the dead palm in the big pot in the corner. Everything is still. She just nods her head in response to the ques- tion and clutches the purse to her, think- ing, It's all right, just show him to the door now, and thank him, tell him the reward's coming In the mail, just leave an address. . . . But Bob Smith isn't ready to leave. In fact, he's hovering over her now, his face as rucked and seamed as an old mailbag, his eyes glittering like something that's been crushed in the street. "So where's the jewelry; then?" he says, and there's nothing of the good Samaritan left in his voice now, no bonhomie, no fellow feeling, or even civility "Can you even find it in this shit hole? Huh?" My widow doesn't say a word. He has a hand on her wrist suddenly, clamped there like a manacle, and he's tugging at her, shouting in her face. "You stupid old bitch! You're going to pay- shit, yes, you're going to pay. Any cash? Huh? Cash? You know what that is?" And then, before she has time to an- swer, he snakes out his other hand, the right one, and slaps her till she jerks back from the grip of him like an animal caught in the jaws of a trap. My widow hasn't been slapped in seventy-odd years, not since she got into a fight with her sister over a pan of brownies when their mother stepped out of the kitchen to answer the phone. She's in shock, of course-everything's happened so fast-but she's tough, my widow, as tough at the core as anybody on earth. Nobody slaps her. Nobody comes into her house on false pretenses and-well, you get the picture. And in the next instant her free hand comes up out of the purse with an ancient can of Mace clutched in it, and, because this is a good and fitting universe I'm con- structing here, the aerosol spray still works despite an expiration date ten years past, and, before she can think, Bob Smith is writhing on the floor in a riot of cat feces, cursing and rubbing at his eyes. And more: when my widow turns for the door, ready to scurry out onto that brick porch and scream till her dried-up old lungs give out, who should be standing there at the door but Megan Capaldi, screaming herself IN HEI\ OWN WOl\D5 A s I sa my widow doesn't get the newspaper, not anymore. But Megan Capaldi brings her two copies the next da because her picture is on the front page under the caption, "Feisty Octogenarian Thwarts Burglary." There she is, hunched and squinting into the camera, arm in arm with Megan Ca- paldi, who dialled 911 on her cell phone and escorted my widow to safety while the San Roque Municipal Police hand- cuffed Bob Smith and secured him in the back of their cruiser. In the photo- graph, which shows off the front of the house to real advantage, I think-the windows especiall with their intricate design and the wooden frames I scraped, sanded, and painted at least three times in the course of my tenure here-my widow is smiling. So, too, is Megan Ca- paldi, who wouldn't be bad-looking at all if only she'd stand up straight. Posed there, with the house mushrooming over them in grainy black and white, you can hardly tell them apart. On page 2, at the end of the article, my widow is given an opportunity to re- flect on her ordeal. "It's a shame, is what it is," she is quoted as saying, "the way people like this prey on the elderly-and don't forget the telemarketers, they're just as bad. It didn't use to be this wa before everybody got so suspicious of